Riding on the offspring ripplesof an intermittent early morning rainis a pebble. A gray sky residing in the shallow,once dormantstill stagnant puddle,fails to stifle the clamor,of shrieking drops disappearing, being ensnared by the soil.

But owning no car and limping along city pavements in it, forever, sometimes "gets old" -- no, wait, it is one who is getting old. The rain is forever young.

Speaking of old, an old, collapsing house, with old people in it, leaking everywhere, sliding down a muddy hillside in the rain... this, I think, is where those winter "ghosts" come in, with their slippery grammar, intractable, impossible to parse.

But if one is to be caught in a downpour or washed away in a flood, what better way to do it than in the company of several excellent poets, reminding one that Spring flowers may yet pop up through the slick asphalt.

What makes us sad is perhaps not the rain but the clouds it comes from? After all, a spring rain on a bright day is a delight. It's the grey heaviness above the rain that weighs down upon us, and sometimes the rain itself is a relief from that pressure.

Yes, Zeph, but what we have going on with this El Ninõ event -- which we are to expect to last through the springtime -- is layer upon layer of that grey heaviness of which you speak, so that when one discharges itself (often violently this past week, with strong winds, hail, lightning and thunder), the relief is very brief, for a new layer is already advancing and weighing down with its oppressive pressure. I must say it is getting more than a bit tiresome at this point, though as we're told to expect four or five months of it, I suppose we'd do well to become accustomed to it somehow.

The relation of this phemomenon to global warming remains a much worried question, and coincidentally I found myself in the role of the village idiot on a thread discusssing an article on the subject posted by a geophysics expert at a blog called RealClimate. The coincidental part was that the man (Raymond Pierrehumbert) had spoken in his post of having just turned in his new 700 page book on climate change to Cambridge University Press, referring to it as "animula". It seems the scientists didn't get the reference until one of them found my blog post addressing the poem by the dying Emperor Hadrian with that title ("animula blandula, vagula").